West of October, Ray Bradbury

West Of October

The four cousins Peter, William, Philip, and Jack had lingered on after the Homecoming because a cloud of doom and melancholy and disbelief hung over Europe. There was no room in the dark House, so they were stashed almost upside-down in the barn, which shortly thereafter burned.

Like most of the Family they were not ordinary.
To say that most of them slept days and worked at odd occupations nights would fall short of commencement.
To remark that some of them could read minds, and some fly with lightnings to land with leaves, would be an understatement.

To add that some could not be seen in mirrors while others could be found in multitudinous shapes, sizes, and textures in the same glass would merely repeat gossip that veered into truth.
These boys resembled their uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents by the toadstool score and the mushroom dozen.

They were just about every color you could mix in one restless night.
Some were young and others had been around since the Sphinx first sank its stone paws in tidal sands.
And all four were in love and in need for one special Family member.
Cecy.

Cecy. She was the reason, the real reason, the central reason for the wild cousins to circle her and stay. For she was as seedpod full as a pomegranate. She was all the senses of all the creatures in the world. She was all the motion-picture houses and stage-play theaters and all the art galleries of all time.

Ask her to yank your soul like an aching tooth and shoot it into clouds to cool your spirit, and yanked you were, drawn high to drift in the mists.
Ask her to seize that same soul and bind it in the flesh of a tree, and you awoke the next morning with birds singing in your green head.

Ask to be pure rain and you fell on everything. Ask to be the moon and suddenly you looked down to see your pale light painting lost towns the color of tombstones and spectral ghosts.
Cecy. Who extracted your soul and pulled forth your impacted wisdom, and could transfer it to animal, vegetable, or mineral; name your poison.

No wonder the cousins lingered.
And along about sunset, before the dreadful fire, they climbed to the attic to stir her bed of Egyptian sands with their breath.
“Well,” said Cecy, eyes shut, a smile playing about her mouth. “What would your pleasure be?”
“I” said Peter.

“Maybe” said William and Philip.
“Could you” said Jack.
“Take you on a visit to the local insane asylum,” guessed Cecy, “to peek inside people’s corkscrew heads?”

“Yes!”
“Done!” said Cecy. “Go lie on your cots in the barn. Over, up, and out!”
Like corks, their souls popped. Like birds, they flew. Like bright needles, they shot in various crazed asylum ears.
“Ah!” they cried in delight.

While they were gone, the barn burned.

In all the shouting and confusion, the running for water, the general ramshackle hysteria, everyone forgot who was in the barn or what the high-flying cousins and Cecy, asleep, might be up to.

So deep in her rushing dreams was she, that she felt neither the flames, nor the dread moment when the walls fell and four human-shaped torches self-destroyed. A clap of thunder banged across country, shook the skies, knocked the wind-blown essences of cousins through mill-fans, while Cecy, with a gasp, sat straight up and gave one shriek that shot the cousins home. All four, at the moment of concussion, had been in various asylum bins, prying trap-door skulls to peek in at maelstroms of confetti the colors of madness, the dark rainbows of nightmare.

“What happened?” cried Jack from Cecy’s mouth.
“What!” said Philip, moving her lips.
“My god.” William stared from her eyes.
“The barn burned,” said Peter. “We’re lost!”

The Family, soot-faced in the smoking yard, turned like a traveling minstrel’s funeral and stared up at Cecy in shock.
“Cecy?” called Mother, wildly. “Is someone with you?”
“Me, Peter!” shouted Peter from her lips.

“Philip!”
“William!”
“Jack!”
The souls counted off from Cecy’s tongue.
The Family waited.

Then, as one, the four young men’s voices asked the final, most dreadful question:
“Didn’t you save just one body?”
The Family sank an inch into the earth, burdened with a reply they could not give.

“But” Cecy held on to her elbows, touched her own chin, her mouth, her brow, inside which four live ghosts wrestled for room. “But what’ll I do with them?” Her eyes searched all those faces below in the yard. “My cousins can’t stay! They can’t stand around in my head!”

What she cried after that, or what the cousins babbled, crammed like pebbles under her tongue, or what the Family said, running like burned chickens in the yard, was lost.
With Judgment Day thunders, the rest of the barn fell.

With a vast whisper the ashes blew away in an October wind that leaned this way and that on the attic roof.
“It seems to me,” said Father.
“Not seems, but is!” said Cecy, eyes shut.

“We must farm the cousins out. Find temporary hospices until such time as we can cull new bodies”
“The quicker the better,” said four voices from Cecy’s mouth, now high, now low, now two gradations between.
Father continued in darkness. “There must be someone in the Family with a small room in the backside of their cerebellum! Volunteers!”

The Family sucked in an icy breath and stayed silent. Great Grandmere, far above in her own attic place, suddenly whispered: “I hereby solicit, name, and nominate the oldest of the old!”
As if their heads were on a single string, everyone turned to blink at a far corner where their ancient Nile River Grandpere leaned like a dry bundle of two-millennia-before-Christ wheat.
The Nile ancestor husked, “No!”

“Yes!” Grandmere shut her sand-slit eyes, folded her brittle arms over her tomb-painted bosom. “You have all the time in the world.”
“Again, no!” The mortuary wheat rustled.
“This,” Grandmere murmured, “is the Family, all strange-fine. We walk nights, fly winds and airs, wander storms, read minds, work magic, live forever or a thousand years, whichever. In sum, we’re Family, to be leaned on, turned to, when”
“No, no!”

“Hush.” One eye as large as the Star of India opened, burned, dimmed, died. “It’s not proper, four wild men in a slim girl’s head. And there’s much you can teach the cousins. You thrived long before Napoleon walked in and ran out of Russia, or Ben Franklin died of pox. Fine if the boys’ souls were lodged in your ear some while. It might straighten their spines. Would you deny this?”

The ancient ancestor from the White and Blue Niles gave only the faintest percussion of harvest wreaths.
“Well, then,” said the frail remembrance of Pharaoh’s daughter. “Children of the night, did you hear!?”
“We heard!” cried the ghosts from Cecy’s mouth.
“Move!” said the four-thousand-year-old mummification.
“We move!” said the four.

And since no one had bothered to say which cousin went first, there was a surge of phantom tissue, a tide-drift of storm on the unseen wind.
Four different expressions lit Grandpere’s harvest ancestor’s face. Four earthquakes shook his brittle frame. Four smiles ran scales along his yellow piano teeth. Before he could protest, at four different gaits and speeds, he was shambled from the house, across the lawn, and down the lost railroad tracks toward town, a mob of laughter in his cereal throat.

The Family leaned from the porch, staring after the rushing parade of one.
Cecy, deep asleep again, gaped her mouth to free the echoes of the mob.

At noon the next day the big, dull-blue iron engine panted into the railroad station to find the Family restless on the platform, the old harvest pharaoh supported in their midst. They not so much walked but carried him to the day coach, which smelled of fresh varnish and hot plush. Along the way, the Nile traveler, eyes shut, uttered curses in many voices that everyone ignored.

They propped him like an ancient corn-shock in his seat, fastened a hat on his head like putting a new roof on an old building, and addressed his wrinkled face.
“Grandpere, sit up. Grandpere, are you in there? Get out of the way, cousins, let the old one speak.”
“Here.” His dry mouth twitched and whistled. “And suffering their sins and misery! Oh, damn, damn!”
“No!”
“Lies!”
“We did nothing!” cried the voices from one side, then the other, of his mouth. “Cease!”

“Silence!” Father seized the ancient chin and focused the inner bones with a shake. “West of October is Sojourn, Missouri, not a long trip. We have kin there. Uncles, aunts, some with, some without children. Since Cecy’s mind can only travel a few miles, you must cargo-transit these obstreperous cousins yet farther and stash them with Family flesh and minds.”
“But if you can’t distribute the fools,” he added, “bring them back alive.”

“Goodbye!” said four voices from the ancient harvest bundle.
“Goodbye Grandpere, Peter, William, Philip, Jack!”
“Forget me not!” a young woman’s voice cried.
“Cecy!” all shouted. “Farewell!”
The train chanted away, west of October.
The train rounded a long curve. The Nile ancestor leaned and creaked.

“Well,” whispered Peter, “here we are.”
“Yes.” William went on: “Here we are.”
The train whistled.
“Tired,” said Jack.
“You’re tired!” the ancient one rasped.
“Stuffy in here,” said Philip.
“Expect that! The ancient one is four thousand years old, right, old one? Your skull is a tomb.”
“Cease!” The old one gave his own brow a thump. A panic of birds knocked in his head. “Cease!”

“There,” whispered Cecy, quieting the panic. “I’ve slept well and I’ll come for part of the trip, Grandpere, to teach you how to hold, stay, and keep the resident crows and vultures in your cage.”
“Crows! Vultures!” the cousins protested.
“Silence,” said Cecy, tamping the cousins like tobacco in an ancient uncleaned pipe. Far away, her body lay on her Egyptian